THE LOSERS ARE NOT ALWAYS WRONG

A mass movement which swept millions behind it, the Popular Front burnt itself out in disillusionment and defeat as its left-wing critics had warned from the start. Slandered, ostracized and, in some cases, physically liquidated, these critics, ignored by the masses and isolated in small groups, appeared to be the ‘losers’. In the perspective of the fiftieth anniversary they come into their own. Why, then, did they fail to turn the tide of historical events?

ORIGINS OF THE POPULAR FRONT

There would have been no Popular Front but for the tactical turn made by the Comintern as a belated response to the German left's defeat of 1933. It would have been inconceivable without a major turn in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. The new line was consecrated at the Comintern's Seventh Congress in July–August 1935 – most emphatically in the speeches of Dimitrov and Ercoli (Palmiro Togliatti) – while the French leaders claimed great success had already been achieved.

The Popular Front was designed to confront the twin problems of the growing military threat from Nazi Germany and the spread of fascism. Its novelty lay in the parallel search for international alliances with ‘peace-loving’ bourgeois states and national coalitions between workers’ parties (including communist parties), and capitalist parties opposed to fascism. There was thus a fundamental difference between the Popular Front and the united front advocated by the Comintern in the 1920s.